One of the most common slams made against modernist (Yavanayāna) Buddhism is that it is “Protestant.” I’ve previously written about how there’s more to Buddhist modernism than this, and about the curious quasi-theological assumption that having Protestant influence is seen as a bad thing. At the same time, I’ve been realizing that there are close links between Protestantism and modernism. Not too surprising, perhaps, since the two emerge out of the same historical context, the Europe of the past 500 years – but I think their similarities may go deeper than that.

One of the more interesting elements of teaching at Stonehill was explaining Protestantism to a student body composed largely of ethnic Catholics. I remember giving a lecture on the history of Protestantism and having a student ask, “But what do Protestants believe?” It was a great question, for in my focus on history I’d neglected to say much about, say, the relative emphasis on the Bible or on Mary. The fault was mine for naïvely assuming it would be something students already knew. And so in later versions of the course, I gave students a much more detailed account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in turn these differences became much clearer to me myself.

I particularly came to realize how evangelical Protestantism – the growing Protestant wing of which fundamentalist Protestantism is basically a subset – is basically a more extreme form of Protestantism itself, “more extreme” in the sense of being much more characteristically Protestant and less Catholic. And what I found central in evangelicalism specifically but to some extent in Protestantism generally is something analogous, and perhaps even homologous, to modernism.

This central thing might be called single-mindedness: the tendency to focus on “what’s really important,” at the expense of the ancillary details. That’s the attitude behind all the ugly modernist architecture: the most important thing is to give people a comfortable, hygienic, convenient place to live. You can do without all those frivolous aesthetic details; focus on the big stuff, and people will learn to like it, as they should.

This same tendency seems to me to underlie evangelical Protestantism. The really important thing is the saving power of Jesus Christ; the rest, one might say, is gravy. And so evangelicals typically congregate in highly modern buildings, most notoriously the “megachurches” like Lakewood Church in Houston, a former sports arena, and often play rock music in their services. You don’t need the beauty and mystery of a centuries-old cathedral and its incense and pipe organ; you need Jesus.

The older, non-evangelical streams of Protestantism, such as Anglicanism and Lutheranism – usually referred to in the US as “mainline” – do not take this extreme approach. They still meet in the old churches, pray in an older style. And yet I think their founders, too, had something of the modernist tendency to privilege the big picture over the details. For Luther as I understand him, Christian tradition had become needlessly packed with irrelevant accretions. History still mattered to him – but the history that mattered was the history recounted in the Bible, not anything that had happened since then. All those sacraments and rituals were of a piece with selling indulgences. One may note that Luther derives a great deal of his thought from Augustine, and Augustine shares some of this same single-mindedness of focus. Augustine in his work expresses a worried ambivalence about liturgical music – he’s all for it if the lyrics bring people into Christian tradition, but he’s worried that it will be counterproductive if people start enjoying the music for its own sake. (And while many of Augustine’s views did become part of official Catholic tradition, they were typically tempered by the more worldly Aristotelian views of Thomas Aquinas.)

This kind of single-mindedness is not confined to Christianity or secularism, either. This single-mindedness is also the most prominent feature of the Salafi or Wahhabi strain of contemporary Islam. At first glance, Salafi tradition is as opposed to modernism as can be, for it claims that Islamic tradition was perfected in its first few centuries and every following innovation is worthless or worse. But the Salafis share with the modernists a single-minded disdain for the details of established tradition. And aesthetically the two come to look very similar. In recent years the Saudi Arabian state, which officially endorses Salafi Islam, has deliberately destroyed most of the historic sites of old Mecca and Medina, partially to make room for more infrastructure for pilgrims, but just as much because of Salafi ideology. People offered veneration and prayer at many of those sites, such as the grave of Muhammad’s mother. But to a Salafi, such activity is idolatrous, associating partners with God and compromising his unity. Better not to have them around. (Evangelicals, I might note, often take a similar attitude to many Catholic traditions, especially the reverence for Mary.)

Further musings on philosophical single-mindedness next week.

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15 thoughts on “Philosophical single-mindedness (1)”

Amod, just a few thoughts and questions:
1. I would call the basic attitude of the kind of Protestantism you depict and of Wahhabi Islam, etc., “fundamentalism”, in the etymological meaning of the will to go back to the fundamentals of one’s religions. They might admit much more than one thing, but it has to be “originary”.
2. I would predict single-mindedness should lead to not playing any music at all, not to playing rock music and meeting under a fake sky of powerful lights pretending to be stars (or whatever else). Hence, I would not say that the arena you mention is a result of single-mindedness, but rather a historical result of the emergence of a new tradition (one for which sport, rock and disco-lighting are meaningful).

On 1, because the term “fundamentalism” tends to be applied so widely, I prefer to reserve it for the American fundamentalism with which it originated – and to the traditions that share its most basic tenet, which I take to be scriptural literalism. So there are a number of Islamic traditions which can meaningfully be called fundamentalist, but not many outside of Christianity and Islam. In a certain way, the fundamentalists are not quite even going back to the origins – for, by their own account, the origin of their tradition was not in the Bible but in Jesus.

On 2, I see the rock music as coming from the attitude that none of the tradition’s historical details are sacred to it. I’m not sure it is about the environment of the new churches being meaningful, so much as it is simply about liking it. If you talked to a Lakewood Churchgoer and told them that in your (Bible-believing) church you played only bossa nova or Irish folk music (with Christian lyrics), they might think they wouldn’t enjoy your church or be concerned it wouldn’t attract enough people, but I can’t imagine them objecting to it. The Catholic church has many rules set out about how it’s appropriate to construct a church and what kind of music can be played; mainline Protestant churches often do as well. For evangelicals, as long as it has the Christian lyrics, anything goes – which in practice means the music the churchgoers are most likely to be familiar and comfortable with.

Good discussion, Amod. I can’t speak to Buddhism or to Islam, but I’ve come to learn more about the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, especially as a recently converted Catholic after having been raised in Protestant traditions.

You identify a close relationship between Protestantism and modernism, and perhaps you can help me define whether or not Protestantism tends towards postmodernism, too, by which I tend to mean, tearing everything apart until almost nothing is left. I don’t think Protestantism is there, yet, but I think it contributes to it.

I guess I’ll wait for your answer to that question, first, before I comment on your single-mindedness hypothesis. Just to begin, though, I don’t think Protestant traditions would argue against a single-mindedness on the saving power of Jesus, but I wonder if you could say that older traditions don’t have a single-mindedness, too. I tend to think of the main difference between Protestantism and Catholicism as the idea that the individual can find Jesus on their own with very little else but the help of the Bible, really, which is where the Protestant idea of Sola Scriptura comes from. It is this privileging of the individual that I think results in Protestantism tending towards postmodernism.

Kyle, it’s an interesting question to think about Protestantism tending toward postmodernism – especially because it’s so close to the question of whether modernism itself tends toward postmodernism, as many have suggested (for good or for ill). It’s a bit dangerous to identify “tendencies” too easily and quickly, but I think there is something to the connection, perhaps especially in Protestantism’s antinomianism – its rejection of established rules, especially in morality. The Protestant emphasis on faith over works – again a single-mindedness – has sometimes come out to “it doesn’t matter whether you’re a good person or not, what matters is whether you’re saved.” (This is typically tied to an Augustinian anthropology that sees humans as so fallen we can’t ever really be good people.) And that kind of rejection of norms comes very close to postmodern relativism.

Related rambles: The Romans accused the early Christians of atheism, as weird as that seems to us now, because to them having only one God was pretty close to having none. Perhaps a similar sort of point could apply to the evangelicals: they reduce all value to one thing, and if that one thing is knocked down, what you’re left with is postmodernism.

Many Anglicans, perhaps fewer in the US, do not see themselves as Protestants. In my family the phrase was “Reformed not Protestant”.

I have always felt that a lot of the difference between the Protestants and the remainder of the Christian tradition (I nearly said “the Holy Catholic Church throughout all the world”) comes from the idea of “Separation of Church and State”. Once separated from the state the churches could concentrate on being “religions” not ways of living.

Bob, thank you and welcome to the blog! I suppose the Anglicans may be a bad example here in that they retain more elements of Catholicism than do the other churches of the Reformation. Perhaps one might consider “Protestantism” as something of an ideal type, so that there is a sliding scale from most fully Protestant (the evangelicals) to the regular mainline churches in the middle, the Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans, and the Anglicans as one step shy from Catholicism.

There are two reasons for the ideal of separation of church and state. The first has to do with preventing the persecution of minority religions (perhaps not a valid reason in the mind of a dogmatic true believer of a religion that conceives of itself as the source of Truth).

The second reason is that involvement in secular affairs and politics tends to corrupt the established religion. This has been the case throughout history and across cultures from the Medici Popes, to the tyrant Henry VIII, to the jockeying among Tibetan Buddhist lineages for secular political power.

So, I tend to view the separation of church and state as a helpful factor in nurturing genuine spirituality, at least in the West — not as a way of divorcing spirituality from life.

I grew up going to Catholic churches with my mom and Methodist churches with my dad. As far as I could tell as a kid, the only difference was that Methodist pastors didn’t wear fancy robes! I now appreciate the subtler differences, but we should remember they’re all Christians. Regarding the single-mindedness thesis, I find Catholics to be more varied about their beliefs. Maybe this is just the Catholics I know, but many are more open about whether they agree with the Church’s teachings on issues like birth control and abortion, whereas the smaller Protestant denominations tend to be more uniform in agreeing with their church. Catholicism has become more of a cultural thing for many people. As long as you get confirmed and go to church on major holidays, you’re in the fold, whereas some Protestants are much more serious about believing the right thing. Of course, these are just tendencies. There are plenty of belief-lax Protestants, with Unitarians and Quakers among the most lax, as well as more belief-centered Catholics . Nonetheless, Protestantism has always been single-minded in stressing believing the right thing, whereas Catholics probably should believe some things, but doing certain things is just as important. As I get older, I appreciate the Catholic tendency more. Maybe I just find the dogmatism that tends to come from stressing a single core of belief to be more annoying than funny hats and incense.

My understanding has always been that Protestantism starts from Calvin and the Swiss Reform Movement. I volunteer at a local history museum, usually in the News Paper Office. In talking to visitors there I was reminded of the close connection between the early printing industry and the Reformation. Literacy and the availability of printed Bibles, especially the smaller sized editions, encouraged people to think for themselves rather than simply accepting the interpretation of the church. The Roman Catholic Church was opposed to the idea that doctrine was to be sought uniquely in scripture.

I personally feel that this was probably a wise position. I have a suspicion that the emphasis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam on the sanctity of scipture is very close to idolatry. After all the printed page is simply another kind of “graven image”.

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